Jessica Lepler

Education

Courses Taught

HIST 405: History of Early AmericaHIST 500: Introduction to Historical ThinkingHIST 606/806: History of the Early America RepublicHIST 612/812: Emergence of Industrial AmericaHIST 621/821: History of American ThoughtHIST 797: Senior Colloquium in HistoryHIST 939: Readings in Early American History

Specialties

intersection between culture and capitalism in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world

Bio

Jessica Lepler is an associate professor of history. In 2013, Cambridge University Press published Professor Lepler’s first book, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. It was awarded a James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize.

Professor Lepler earned her B.A. in history and religious traditions of the West from Newcomb College of Tulane University. As an undergraduate, she also studied at Mansfield College, Oxford University. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. The Society of American Historians awarded her doctoral dissertation the 2008 Allan Nevins Prize. She has also been the recipient of a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, a Dissertation Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society, a John E. Rovensky Dissertation Fellowship in Business History, and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. She currently chairs the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize Committee and is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

Professor Lepler teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of early America with a particular emphasis on the culture of capitalism. She offers courses on the Early American Republic, American Intellectual History, the Emergence of Industrial America, Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century, and the History of Animals. She serves as the Department of History’s honors advisor, Undergraduate Research Conference coordinator, and Phi Alpha Theta advisor. Prior to her arrival at UNH in 2008, Professor Lepler was a visiting assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Professor Lepler is currently researching and writing a book about the history of the first transoceanic canal contract awarded by the newly independent Republic of Central America.